Heard but Unseen, Seven Actors Share 'Talk Radio' Roles

By NAN ROBERTSON

Published: July 30, 1987

Correction Appended

Eric Bogosian's new play ''Talk Radio,'' about a nighttime phone-in-show host teetering on the edge of dementia, could just as well be called ''Voices Off.''

The reason is that the most crucial interactions do not take place onstage, but occur between Mr. Bogosian and 28 offstage callers telephoning in to Barry Champlain's fictional ''Nighttalk.'' The voices are not taped. They belong to seven actors who chatter away in several roles apiece every night, rotating among three makeshift telephone booths backstage.

The setting of ''Talk Radio,'' now playing at the Public Theater, is a broadcasting studio in Cleveland. There is a control booth at stage right. Mr. Bogosian as Barry Champlain - ''Barry'' or ''Bare'' to his callers - sits jittering at a table at stage left, ready to open his headphones to the next call or punch the cut-off button if the caller displeases him. He is linked electronically to the actors backstage, who hear Mr. Bogosian over phones in each backstage booth, and whose own voices are amplified for the audience by microphones built into the telephone mouthpieces.

The unseen actors manage to populate the air with almost palpable characters - a mixed bag of weirdos and loners. Barry Champlain savages almost all of them in a sado-masochistic dialogue that usually ends in a verbal slap. 'Not Interesting!'

A transvestite named Francine is saving money for a sex-change operation. ''What possible interest do you think your personal adventures in surgery would hold for my listeners?'' bellows Barry. ''Not interesting!'' he snaps, and cuts the caller off.

Denise, a paranoid hysteric frightened of everything on earth including her garbage disposal, talks of running into the Boston Strangler. ''Sounds like a fun date,'' says Barry. Click.

There is Henry, protesting a nearby nuclear power plant. ''I got news for you pal - we all gotta die,'' sneers Barry. ''Did I hurt your feelings, pal? Go tell it to your shrink.'' Click. The invisible characters include an anti-Semitic heavy breather, a lonely young widow, a relentlessly cheerful but somehow sinister Vietnam amputee, a sobbing 15-year-old who is pregnant and has been abandoned by her boyfriend, and an old silly who dotes upon his cat, Muffin. ''You and Muffin sound pretty intimate,'' croons Barry. ''You're not into anything funny are you? She's fixed, isn't she?'' Indignant sputterings from Muffin's owner. Click. The Unseen Seven

Only two callers seem quick enough to get a shot off at Barry. ''Are you as ugly-looking as you sound?'' begins one. ''Uglier,'' Barry ripostes. Another says, ''I think you do believe in God.'' Barry falls for it and asks why. ''It's simple,'' says the caller. ''You think you are God.''

These and many other characters are all bent in some way. The seven actors who portray them are Linda Atkinson, William DeAcutis, Susan Gabriel, Zach Grenier, Michele M. Mariana, Peter Onorati and Michael Wincott.

Only Mr. Wincott has a solid onstage role, as a young caller named Kent, totally unhinged by drugs and media bilge, who turns up in person on the Barry Champlain show. Three others have fleeting parts, but Ms. Gabriel, Ms. Mariana and Mr. Onorati, like the corpses in ''Arsenic and Old Lace,'' are visible only when they take their bows at the end of ''Talk Radio.''

In interviews, the mostly Unseen Seven called their backstage acting chores in ''Talk Radio'' very difficult. ''It's undeniably harder,'' said Mr. Grenier. ''It's all in the voice - in your mind, too. All the physical work has to be done vocally.''

Ms. Mariana called it ''incredibly challenging.''

''We don't see the actor we're working off of,'' she said. ''There's no eye contact, no physical business we can do to bridge the space between us.''

Despite the lack of eye contact, the backstage actors employ a good deal of body language as they whisper, shout or sob through the phone to Mr. Bogosian out front. The most physical of them are Mr. Wincott, as the crazed drug addict, and Mr. Onorati.

The heavily muscled Mr. Onorati, who works out three times a week on Nautilus machines and does knee-bends and stretching exercises before making each call in ''Talk Radio,'' said, ''I try to get everything into my body.'' He is often on his feet in the backstage telephone booth, swaying and bobbing, sometimes petting his arm as if it were Muffin the cat.

''My coach at Boonton High School in New Jersey used to say of me, 'One hundred seventy-two pounds of blue twisted steel, tempered to perfection,' Mr. Onorati recalled with a laugh, ''and then I'd go out on the field and trip over my shoelaces. But no doubt about it, I'm very physical.''

Ms. Gabriel's most athletic performance comes while she is playing Denise, the paranoid recluse. In the booth, she moves incessantly, pounding her fingers into the little table that holds the phone, shaking one arm, ducking her head. A Full Life

Every one of the actors has made up a little life for each character, down to a job, a home and an ethnic background. Mr. Onorati bases his characters on real people he has known.

There is no ad-libbing in this nonstop, 90-minute-long production. Everything is in the script. One reason is that the lines have to be synchronized throughout the play with images flashed on a screen behind Mr. Bogosian.

Even the playwright-star, in full view of the audience at all times, found his role ''definitely more difficult than I thought it would be when I wrote it,'' he said.

''I have to have all their lines memorized as well as mine,'' Mr. Bogosian said. ''I have to do several things at one time - I have to react to the caller; I have to show the audience how I really feel about the caller; I have to push buttons, light cigarettes, drink coffee.

''I'm thinking, 'The show should be getting easier. Why do I have to listen so hard?' I'm listening to a whole pile of sound coming down on me. I know they can't see me. But I can't see them, either.''